Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy (1844 - 1881) was a British poet, born in London to Irish parents.
At the age of seventeen he received the post of transcriber in the library of the British Museum, reportedly through the influence of Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton.
Two years later he became an assistant in the natural history department, where he specialized in Ichthyology.
However, his true passion was for literature. He published his first collection, Epic of Women, in 1870, and published two more collections of poetry in 1872 and 1874.
When he was thirty he married and did not produce any more volumes of poetry for the last seven years of his life (he died aged 37).
His last volume, Songs of a Worker, was published posthumously in 1881.
By far the most noted of any his works are the initial lines of the Ode from his book Music and Moonlight (1874.)
The first two lines of his poem have even been used in the screenplay, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and the ode was set to music by Sir Edward Elgar in 1912.
(From Wikipedia)
WE ARE THE MUSIC MAKERS
We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;—
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.
With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world's great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire's glory:
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song's measure
Can trample a kingdom down.
We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself in our mirth;
And o'erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world's worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.
A breath of our inspiration
Is the life of each generation;
A wondrous thing of our dreaming
Unearthly, impossible seeming—
The soldier, the king, and the peasant
Are working together in one,
Till our dream shall become their present,
And their work in the world be done.
Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy
There are five further verses and you can read the complete poem at:
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